Neither Maurice Watson nor Jada McFadden was very well prepared for the future when Jada discovered that she was pregnant for the first time at sixteen. Both ended up dropping out to support the child, with Maurice working two jobs -- a busboy in a local diner and as a janitor at the very high school he had just left in his senior year. Soon after Jada gave birth to Mychael, she ended up going to work as well as a waitress and the family scraped by on their minimal means and support from their extended families. Soon, Jada found herself pregnant again -- it certainly wasn't their plan to add another child to what was a very small one bedroom home, and yet the Watsons would consider no other option. So it was into these tough means that Damiris Elesha Watson was born. She proved to be a happy child, mostly untouched by the culture of poverty that surrounded her -- or perhaps because it surrounded her so pervasively, Damiris was mostly oblivious to all the things that was missing from her life, without many affluent peers to compare herself to. And those were just things, anyhow. With the love and support of her family, she managed to thrive. Aside from having, more or less, a healthy disposition, she was also a bright student once she entered the school system. At least for a time.
As Damiris grew older, she began to become more aware of what was going on around her. It started when she noticed how dissatisified Mychael, who she idolized, grew to be with the modest means they were living by. Like Damiris, he had started out a perfectly content child until some time in grade school, when he seemed to notice everything that was lacking in their lives. At first, Mychael's anger manifested as a kind of brattiness or jealousy but as he grew older, it became genuine anger and a desire to change their conditions. Like many of the neighborhood boys, he felt into crime and gangs. As he landed in and out of juvenile detention centers, Damiris' family life became full of strife. If anything it prompted her, in her youth, to become even more studious. Clearly, Mychael's means were more like quicksand than anything, and the more he and other boys she knew like him tried to escape from the worst of it, the more it pulled him in. Damiris had designs on getting her education, going to college, maybe becoming a social worker if she thought that she could stomach it. Music was something special to her -- she sang in the church, and her maternal grandmother had been a backup singer in the heyday of the 1970s, but the combination of how frivolous it seemed and Damiris' innate shyness convinced her for many years to consider it anything but a hobby.
That was before she reached adolescence. By the time she was fifteen, Damiris had a growing interest in the opposite sex and in letting loose with her peers -- she figured she was immune from making stupid decisions, having seen where her parents ended up or her brother's perpetual cruising on the wrong side of the law. Stupid decisions, as it turned out, were in her blood as much as music was. Burdened by Mychael's mounting legal fees, the Watsons allowed Damiris to move to Atlanta in 2001 to live with her retired grandmother. Although she was hardly well off herself, she at least seemed to be doing better financially and in truth, Damiris was following her high school boyfriend, who had dropped out and moved to Atlanta earlier that year himself to throw himself into the music scene. As it turned out, the relationship was over, but between his influence and her grandmother's, Damiris had a growing love of music -- and not the kind that was sung in church. It wasn't before long that she was getting into the right crowds and meeting the right people; eventually, Damiris was introduced to Outkast's Big Boi, who took a shine to her sound and her goals. Together, they formed the Wondaland Arts Society, while Damiris recorded her first album -- an EP called The Audition, which featured fourteen tracks total and became the genesis of her eventual alter-ego, Cindi Mayweather.
After a while, Damiris stopped going to school altogether, although she waited quite a long time to tell her parents that she had dropped out. Instead, she started working as a maid at a hotel and used the money earned to press her own copies of her EP, generating about 400 in all. During that time, she appeared on two of Outkast's tracks for Idlewild and eventually Big Boi told Sean Combs about her talent, but mostly she worked her disgusting job and in her downtime practiced her craft, fine tuning her sound and her image for the inevitability that she would become a star. She signed to Bad Boy Records in 2006, releasing The Metropolis a year later. By then, she had conceived of the whole Cindi Mayweather saga; The Metropolis was meant to be the first suite, where she intended over the course of four albums to tell the story of the android messiah, standing in for all of society's other and giving voice to many of the experiences she'd seen back home. It was R&B at its most high minded, and eventually Damiris scored a Grammy nomination for her efforts.
Since 2007, Damiris has released two full-length albums -- The Archandroid in 2010 and Electric Lady in 2013, each serving as a continuation of the Cindi Mayweather saga, and has toured extensively to support both. Although Damiris has since moved to Atlanta and Los Angeles, she still remains true to her Kansas City roots, utilizing her music as a platform to raise awareness of the struggles of her community. Aside from being a recognized musician, Damiris has also become a significant advocate for the struggles of the poor and women.
